In recent years communication systems have added many new services for consumer use. For example, a Voice Mail System is used to provide a voice messaging service to the called party when the called party is unavailable. More particularly, leaving a voice message for a called party is in widespread use in the case of a non-completed telephone call (e.g., where the called party is either busy or otherwise unavailable). Voice messages may in fact be more efficient than telephone conversations where participation of the two parties to a call is not really required to transfer simple information. Voice messaging can be considered a replacement for a human attendant who would otherwise be required to transcribe the message, or for a simple analog recording device (answering machine) that can be connected to a called telephone. In this regard see, for example, the book entitled "A Practical Guide to Voice Mail" by Martin F. Parker, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1987 at pages 2-20 and 198-199; and the article entitled "Voice Mail and Competing Services" by Dr. I. Gitman in Computer Message Systems, edited by R. P. Uhlig, Proceeding of the IFIP TC-6 International Symposium On Computer Message Systems, Washington, D.C., 5-7 Sep. 1985, North Holland Publishing Co., at pages 405-410.
In current Voice Mail Systems (VMSs) interconnecting a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) with the VMS using voice lines in a hunt group, the VMS activates or deactivates message notification on the message recipient's telephone coupled to the PBX by dialing appropriate codes over one of the voice lines in the hunt group. These voice lines in the hunt group share the load of both incoming calls to the VMS and outgoing message notification calls from the VMS. During peak incoming traffic hours, this creates an undesirable effect of delaying the message notification since the voice lines in the hunt group are occupied by incoming calls for a majority of the time. This delayed message notification situation is unacceptable to many VMS users. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a simple and inexpensive technique for reducing message notification blockage to message recipients of a VMS.